Global Warming is actually misnamed — it should be called Global Weather Volatility. Because of gulfstreams, ocean currents, etc., any overall increase in
temperatures thermodynamically interacts with these other weather climatological elements
and leads not only to a general warming, but to colder winters, stronger
storms, etc.

Hey, its not that complicated — its just physics. Increasing energy in a closed system introduces a range of variable outputs that can potentially be several standard deviations away from historical norms (duh).

I suggest that derivatives for Global Weather Volatility should trade on the CBOE under the ticker symbol "VXG."

Coincidentally, like Oil, and like Natural Gas, if Global Temperature were a stock, its chart would be a technical breakout, and a strong buy:

"Two global-warming skeptics who questioned an
influential climate study and prompted a congressional inquiry are now
facing critics of their own, as a pair of new research papers take
issue with their results.

The new findings are the latest round in a politically charged
dispute over the "hockey stick," a widely publicized graphic showing
that temperatures during the late 20th century were likely higher than
at any time in the past 1,000 years . . ."

Some scientists believe the dispute has more political weight than scientific significance. That’s because, they say, other studies of past temperatures also indicate they are higher now, on average, than at any time in past 1,000 years, and perhaps far longer. "A number of studies all come to the same conclusion," Dr. Mann said.

I find the debate over whether there is such as thimg as Global Warming to be another absurd use of UnScience. If I could short UnScience, I would . . .

So with this post, we also add the category of UnScience to our repetoire . . .

Please use the comments to demonstrate your own ignorance, unfamiliarity with empirical data and lack of respect for scientific knowledge. Be sure to create straw men and argue against things I have neither said nor implied. If you could repeat previously discredited memes or steer the conversation into irrelevant, off topic discussions, it would be appreciated. Lastly, kindly forgo all civility in your discourse . . . you are, after all, anonymous.

Global Weather Volitility (what they call Global Warming) is a reality… But human influence is not yet truely known. If you take your chart back thousands of years, you’ll find many instances similar to our current time period. You’ll also find many inverse instances.

this is the kind of stuff that gets me deep into the bear cave. did u see the New Yorker piece on global warming last summer by Elizabeth Kolbert? made me want to leap out a window. sold everything. i just kept thinking back to PEs of 7 X in early ’90s, when there was no thought of inundated coastal cities, no thought of NYSE closed for week or more due to terrorism, no widespread distaste for US and our policies.

I grew up in a more northern Central European city. From the early 70′s I remember winters with long periods of good snow. The sled-riding was still good into the later 70′s, but during the 80′s the duration and quality of snow deteriorated, and coincidentally talk of smog and its effects emerged. In the later 80′s the snow became really pathetic, and then somebody stole my sled overnight, but that was when it mostly didn’t matter anymore.

These days the city sees little snow, and it melts quickly and makes more of a mess than a joy. Outside the city snow and frost last longer. So it is clearly a local effect of the city generating more heat per square mile, but it says little about global patterns.

The trouble with the intermet is that bad info just hangs around. The hockey stick is one of those:

“But now a shock: independent Canadian scientists Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick have uncovered a fundamental mathematical flaw in the computer program that was used to produce the hockey stick. In his original publications of the stick, Mann purported to use a standard method known as principal component analysis, or PCA, to find the dominant features in a set of more than 70 different climate records.

But it wasn’t so. McIntyre and McKitrick obtained part of the program that Mann used, and they found serious problems. Not only does the program not do conventional PCA, but also it handles data normalization in a way that can only be described as mistaken.

Now comes the real shocker. This improper normalization procedure tends to emphasize any data that do have the hockey stick shape, and to suppress all data that do not. To demonstrate this effect, McIntyre and McKitrick created some meaningless test data that had, on average, no trends. This method of generating random data is called “Monte Carlo” analysis, after the famous casino, and it is widely used in statistical analysis to test procedures. When McIntyre and McKitrick fed these random data into the Mann procedure, out popped a hockey stick shape!”
Mover Mike

‘Mover Mike’: You are write about the ‘bad info hanging around’ thing, the McIntyre and McKitrick paper being a prime example. As the original artuicle pointed out, several independant studies using different proxies and methods which all show the same shape; it would be strange indeed for the Mann study to show anything else. (http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=121)

UnScience will indeed always have a bright future, since it involves telling people what they want to hear, instead of reality. In the case of global warming, we can see this happening on both sides – just try pointing out to your average environmentalist that the only practical way of cutting CO2 emissions is by the large scale construction of nuclear power stations, and see how scientific the response is..

An honest and serious scientific approach to the global warming question leads to only one answer: We dont know anything about forecasting the global weather. If you look at average temperature on more relevant scale such as 10k years, you’ll quickly figure out there is no such thing as a “normal” temperature. You’ll also see it’s silly to use a 30 year trend to predict anything related to geology.

In fact we’re lucky to have those glaciers receding now at a time when other scientists ( no doubt the 10k scalers) were predicting an ice age.
If only those bicyclers knew they were not helping with the cause of putting a few more tons of Co2 out there to ward off the big chill.
On a more relevant scale, (yes indeed !) a few hundred years of industrialization, deforestation, sinking water tables, etc, is nothing compared to what some asteroid could do in a few seconds.
Beware that moment of inattention . Be alert for those asteroids that could change the whole picture, and make us all look silly with our notions of peddling around (or not) cooling (or not) this increasingly busy little planet.

Say Hello

About Barry Ritholtz

Ritholtz has been observing capital markets with a critical eye for 20 years. With a background in math & sciences and a law school degree, he is not your typical Wall St. persona. He left Law for Finance, working as a trader, researcher and strategist before graduating to asset managementRead More...

Quote of the Day

"Misers aren't fun to live with, but they make wonderful ancestors." -David Brenner

Sign Up For My Newsletter

Get subscriber only insights and news delivered by Barry every two weeks.